“If we don’t have women in computer science, we’re only seeing half the picture,” Cassidy said. “We need to have women in the computing workforce to bring their diverse perspectives to a development team, thus creating the best products.”

I was curious about the ratio at Georgia Tech, so I started searching for that (didn’t find it), but did notice that just having Tech in the name tips the scales toward men for overall enrollment: Georgia Tech (67% male / 33% female), Virginia Tech (59% male / 41% female), Texas Tech (55% male / 45% female), Cal-Tech (62% male / 38% female), MIT (55% male / 45% female).

We hear so much about the Harvey Mudd College success story of broadening inclusion in their CS program and it seems like that would be great promo material for attracting young women, but of course, their program doesn’t show up in the highly ranked programs. Should inclusivity be incorporated into the rankings?

It won’t appear in the Taulbee survey, since it is not a PhD granting institution. While there is a high correlation between the top grad schools and the top undergrad schools, looking just at reputation really only looks at the grad schools. (And some of the top grad schools do a poor job of getting their undergrads to go on to get PhDs, preferring to train their students for immediate jobs instead, so the grad and undergrad programs end up having very different goals—it is not clear that those school have much connection between their grad and undergrad programs.)